Our Island Story: England, Europe and the Anglosphere alternative

This article sets out to place political support for Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story in the context of debates about Englishness, the European Union and the Anglosphere. It argues that support for this book was not just a debate about the teaching of history, but was part of a wider contest over the memory of Empire and England’s constitutional past. This traditional narrative was deployed to help imagine and suggest a global future for Britain at a moment when a politics of disengagement with the European Union played out domestically. This contest was not formed in isolation, but was part of a re-engagement with ‘traditional allies’ within the ‘Anglosphere’ helping to answer a dilemma about Britain’s future framed in terms of an English Conservative reading of the past. Arguments in favour of Our Island Story served to emphasise a significant tradition in Anglo-British thought that situated England as the dominant partner in a historic political-economic and cultural enterprise with a global legacy ill-suited to the political project of European integration. Thus, Our Island Story was not merely an innocuous children’s tale, but was part of a politics of disengagement from the European Union that blurred the boundaries of political Englishness.